In a previous tutorial, we showed you how to take screenshots in Mac OS X. Today, we are sharing a set of interesting terminal tweaks to get even more out of screenshots on your Mac. I have tested all of these to work in Snow Leopard.

After every tweak you need to restart SystemUIServer for the changes to be effective. To do this type killall SystemUIServer in Terminal and press Enter.

How to Change Screenshot Filename:

By default the screenshots are named as follows.

While you cannot remove the timestamp from the name, you can definitely change the first word “Screenshot” to something else. To change the default screenshots name open Terminal and type the following command and press enter after typing.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name FILENAME

To restore defaults, type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture name “Screen shot”

How to Change Screenshot Folder Location:

Type this command in Terminal,

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location PATH

If you are not so comfortable typing paths in Terminal don’t worry. Just type the command and then just drag the desired folder to terminal and its path will be automatically copied.

If you are typing the location yourself, make sure the specified folder exists else you’ll get the following error.

To restore defaults, type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/

How to Change Screenshot File Format:

Not many people know that they can also change the default file format to any of the nine formats mentioned in the list below. To change format type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type FORMAT

Availible formats are :

png (default)

pdf

jpg

jp2 (JPG2000)

gif

tif (TIFF)

bmp

pict

tga

To restore defaults, type:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type png

How to Disable Screenshot Shadow:

By default, whenever you capture any window using Command+Shift+4+Space shortcut you would have noticed the shadow attached with the image.

It can be a nuance at times. For example, my image compression tool is set to add shadow automatically after compressing images. That adds double shadows to some images. Also, pictures with alpha appear weird in some wordpress themes.